'Flash of Genius' director tells of his struggle to get the film made

TELLURIDE, COLO. -- The more you hear about "Flash of Genius," the harder it becomes to understand why veteran producer Marc Abraham chose this story above all others for his directorial debut.

It's the saga of Bob Kearns, the inventor of -- are you sitting down? -- intermittent windshield wipers.

Kearns, who died not long ago, could be described as a driven and complicated man or, as one acquaintance said, "crazy." And while he fought for years against automakers who he claimed infringed on his wiper patent, Kearns alienated many of his friends, colleagues and family, including his wife, who left him.

But the very facts that make "Flash of Genius," which stars Greg Kinnear and opens in theaters nationwide on Oct. 3, sound so unapproachable are the very same elements that continuously drew Abraham toward the project. Now, more than 15 years after publication of the New Yorker article on which "Flash of Genius" is based, Abraham's film is finally done -- it played over the weekend at the Telluride Film Festival and will be featured at this week's Toronto International Film Festival. It's quite a turnaround from the initial reaction Abraham received when he first pitched the project.

"Everybody laughed at me when you tell them the idea," says Abraham, who has producing or executive producing credits on "A Thousand Acres," "Air Force One" and "Children of Men," among many others.

But "Flash of Genius" is hardly a chronicle of how car drivers came to see through misting rain. And it's more than a David-and-Goliath courtroom drama about a man with few resources whose crusade matches him against the best scorched-earth litigators of the biggest auto makers. "Flash of Genius" is really a tale of someone who believed that fairness and honesty meant more than anything else -- including piles of money.

"That's the reason I was passionate about it. . . . It was about principle," Abraham says. "And principle is a very gray idea. And that's what I thought was exciting."

Like many inventors before him and countless others to come, Kearns was a dreamer and a tinkerer. A freak wedding night accident (a flying Champagne cork left one of Kearns' eyes essentially useless) led the engineer and college professor to wonder about how -- and why --the eye blinked. Automobile wipers at the time were either on or off; they couldn't be metered to swipe periodically.